Arguments could fill a marriage like water, running through everything, always, with no taste or color but lots of noise.

I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it "intently political." I'm just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.

But I've swallowed my pride before, that's for sure. I'm practically lined with my mistakes on the inside like a bad-wallpapered bathroom.

If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.

Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you're a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democrac and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.

I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer.

But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.